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The War Against Cliche
  • Published: 5 April 2002
  • ISBN: 9780099422228
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 528
  • RRP: $34.99

The War Against Cliche

Essays and Reviews 1971-2000

Formats & editions
Paperback
5 Apr 2002
EBook
1 June 2010
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A remarkable collection of essays and reviews spanning Amis' literary career over three decades.

Like John Updike, Martin Amis is the pre-eminent novelist-critic of his generation. The War Against Cliché is a selection of his reviews and essays over the past quarter-century. It contains pieces on Cervantes, Milton, Donne, Coleridge, Jane Austen, Dickens, Kafka, Philip Larkin, Joyce, Waugh, Lowry, Nabokov, F. R. Leavis, V. S. Pritchett, William Burroughs, Anthony Burgess, Angus Wilson, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Shiva and V. S. Naipaul, Kurt Vonnegut, Iris Murdoch, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Don DeLillo, Elmore Leonard, Michael Crichton, Thomas Harris - and John Updike.

Other subjects include chess, nuclear weapons, masculinity, screen censorship, juvenile violence, Andy Warhol, Hillary Clinton, and Margaret Thatcher.
  • Published: 5 April 2002
  • ISBN: 9780099422228
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 528
  • RRP: $34.99
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About the author

Martin Amis

Martin Amis was twenty-three when he wrote his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973). Over the next half century – in fourteen more novels, two collections of short stories, eight works of literary criticism and reportage, and his acclaimed memoir, Experience – he established himself as the most distinctive and influential prose stylist of his generation. To many of his readers, Amis was also the funniest. His intoxicating comedic gifts express a profound understanding of the human experience, particularly its most shocking cruelties, and Amis wrote with pathos and verve on an astonishing range of subjects, from masculinity and movie violence to nuclear weapons and Nazi doctors. His books, which have been translated into thirty-eight languages, provide an indelible portrait and critique of late-capitalist society at the turn of the twenty-first century. He died in 2023.
portrait photo of Martin Amis

Also by Martin Amis

Book of Lives
Inside Story
Invasion of the Space Invaders
The Rub of Time
The Zone of Interest
Lionel Asbo
The Pregnant Widow
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Praise for The War Against Cliche

A tour de force in which every paragraph uncoils with vertiginous twists and turns, lightning metaphors, genuine learning, unstoppable laughter, and a passionate sense of literary pleasure

Independent

Amis's gifts - vigilance, wit, energy of language... A collection that reaffirms him as the suavest and funniest critic of his generation

Mail on Sunday

Brilliant prose... [Amis] proselytizes for talent by demonstrating it, by doing it... He is a master

New York Times Book Review

[Written] with intelligence and ardor and panache... Speaks not just to a lifetime of reading but also to a fascination with individual writers mature

New York Times

We have here a literary critic of startling power... Often being right and being funny are, in this book, aspects of the same sentence... Amis is the best practitioner-critic of our day - just what Pritchett was in his prime...

London Review of Books